With Beamr app, sending photos is a snap

A new iPhone app called Beamr lets you send high-resolution photos to your friends three times faster, with no loss of quality. It’s free. The receiver gets an email, Twitter or Facebook link and can then download full-resolution copies without registering or signing up.

But that’s not all you get, as they used to say on late night TV. (Whatever happened to those Ginsu knives?) Beamr creates a magazine of photos you can email to your friends. The effect is lovely and it’s free.

This reminds us of the fake magazine covers we used to make at YourCover.com. We used photos of our nephews and their girlfriends, and wrote celebrity-style captions in a fake version of People. It looked quite real. Unfortunately it cost $20 each to have them printed or $13 to download. Those covers from YourCover looked much nicer than the ones from Beamr, but Beamr is free, and it doesn’t just do covers. It also fills other pages with photos, almost like a real magazine. Later on, the company says, it will add the ability to add captions.

Our only Beamr beef is the magazine titles. You can change the text, but they’re always placed in the same position at the top of the page, potentially blocking some one or thing. Beamr execs say the next version will allow you to move the text around. Another problem: The title is always white with a white box around it, which looks amateurish and would be hard to see on a light background. We hope they let you use fonts in the future that mimic the look of real magazines, like Time and Newsweek.

The Beamr technology for sharing high-res photos at three times the speed is also being used to reduce Mac photos. See JpegMini.com.

If you’re like us, you have photos scattered across the Web. We have them on Flickr, Shutterfly, Facebook, Picasa, SmugMug, etc. Woven is a new app for Android, iPhone/iPad, and the Kindle Fire that collects all your photos in one place and organizes them by date and app. The grouping by date is particularly helpful.

Even with all the negative reviews being published about the new Windows 8, we thought the reality was even worse.

Rather than burden our own computers, we went to a local Staples store to try several Windows 8 machines and tablets. We recommend this approach for anyone thinking of upgrading. Try it; you probably won’t like it. (Remember personal computing rule one: Never buy anything with a low serial number.)

The big colorful tiles with links to apps in Windows 8 remind us strongly of the Disney Net Pal computer we reviewed years ago. You’re steered to a host of things you wouldn’t have tried otherwise: Bing Travel, Xbox games, a recipe site, and so on. This can be fun but it soon gets frustrating. How do you close a program? We couldn’t figure it out and the clerk didn’t know, so we kept opening apps one after another. Finally, we clicked the “Ctrl-Alt-Del” keys to bring up the Windows “task manager.” This lets you see what’s running, and sure enough, everything was running, whether we wanted it or not.

The new Windows 8 home screen uses colorful tiles to show programs and applications. If you find this confusing — and we certainly did — you can go to Windows8StartButton.com and download Win8 StartButton; it’s free. It takes you back to a familiar home screen and lets you see “all programs” — just like the good old days.

To watch a few videos recently sent to us by relatives we had to turn our heads to the side. We searched for a way out of that and found a free program called Video Rotator, from VideoRotator.com.

Video Rotator couldn’t be easier. Drag a video from its folder onto a “clockwise” icon, an “anti-clockwise” icon, a “horizontal mirror” or an “upside down” icon. The program does the rest, turning your video so you can watch it right side up.

The most popular video formats are all supported, such as AVI, MPG, FLV, MP4, and so on. However, if you already have a video editing program, like Nero, rotation is an included feature.

•AuntBertha.com picks up where the government left off, offering information on social services. Type in a zip code and get information on sources for jobs, clothing, housing, health and food programs.

•Captricity.com digitizes documents at 20 cents per page, whether they’re hand written or typed. The first 25 pages are free. They use humans, not scanners, and here’s a tip Bob got from someone who uses this kind of data entry service extensively: To assure accuracy as much as you can, have the same documents done by more than one person, because it’s very unlikely that two people would make exactly the same mistake. Yes, it doubles the cost, but for many uses it’s worth it.

Boy, is this a book suited for Christmas. That’s assuming that someone in the family is going to get a LEGO set. The guide shows all the projects in full color and is full of great building tips. You’ll learn the difference between a tile and a plate and why it isn’t a good idea to stack bricks in columns to make a wall. The author says the models he teaches you to build won’t fall apart and can be made in micro or jumbo sizes. Projects include photo mosaics, curved sculptures, train stations with human-like figures and space shuttles. The book has a “Brickopedia,” a visual dictionary of nearly 300 LEGO elements.

Interestingly, at least to us, LEGO, based in Denmark, has a full-time engineer who does nothing all day but go into a room full of LEGO blocks and figure out what he can make.

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